Ten Bosnian Croat war crimes suspects have been taken into custody by the Yugoslavia war crimes tribunal in The Hague following their voluntary surrender.
The group - including the leading Bosnian Croat politician, Mr Dario Kordic, one of the tribunal's most wanted men - landed in the Netherlands yesterday morning and travelled to the tribunal's detention centre at Scheveningen on the outskirts of The Hague.
The 10 were driven into the jail at high speed in two unmarked white Mercedes vans with dark, tinted windows. The vans and accompanying police motorcyclists swept past waiting reporters and TV crews.
"Ten former members of the political and military bodies of the then Croatian community of Herceg-Bosna surrendered themselves into the custody of the International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia," the tribunal said in a statement.
Mr Kordic and Gen Tihomir Blaskic were charged in 1995 with leading a campaign of persecution against Muslims in the Lasva Valley area of central Bosnia in 1993.
Gen Blaskic gave himself up to the tribunal in April 1996 and Mr Kordic and the others followed his example after the United States exerted intense diplomatic pressure on Croatia.
The tribunal's indictment said the crimes committed under the control and direction of Mr Kordic and Gen Blaskic were so widespread and systematic that they destroyed or removed almost the entire Muslim civilian population in the Lasva Valley area.
Several of the suspects who travelled to the Netherlands yesterday are accused of participating in a gruesome massacre at the village of Ahmici in April 1993.
Some accounts at the time spoke of families, including children, being burned alive in their homes.